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Question on changing url for indexed pages

Hi everyone,

I was in the process of going over my site and wanted to make a few changes but was hesitant to do so without finding out if there would be any penalties. Basically I have a page that I would like to change the url of (i.e. it is www.happy.com/super-happy-smile/ and I want to change it www.happy.com/super-great-smile/), and was hoping someone with a little more SEO knowledge can shed some light on a few scenarios.

1) The page is not indexed by Google - using site:happy.com I can see that isn't yet indexed by Google - is there any reason not to change the address?

2) The page is indexed by Google, but I really want to change the address - what should I do? I feel that if I just make the change google will still go looking for the original link instead of the new one... do I make a brand new page and 301 redirect the old page? This way it will still exist technically. Or can I change it without a problem?

3) Not related to the above, but when I use google's site: tool for my website I can get a lot of "search pages" show up, which is bizarre. They seem to be for really weird search strings and I'm not sure why they are showing up, and even more why they are indexed since the pages never existed.. Can anyone shed some light on this? You can see for yourself by checking site: on the site in my sig.

The Following User Says Thank You to universal4 For This Useful Post:

2) The page is indexed by Google, but I really want to change the address - what should I do? I feel that if I just make the change google will still go looking for the original link instead of the new one... do I make a brand new page and 301 redirect the old page? This way it will still exist technically. Or can I change it without a problem?

My understanding is that this is the best way forward - a 301 redirect.

Almost Here! How would you like to be able to get not just one sign up from your player, or even a couple, but every single casino they join from here on? I've a plan that can make that happen and it will likely also tell you every time the player is active within the casino.

Like Travis wrote, I use site:gamblersden.com to see how many pages are indexed. If you check it out and look at the last page you'll see that there are a few tsc.php pages indexed (the url is a long search string) and I'm not sure what this means. I don't understand how google can index a page that doesn't technically exist (and never existed).

About the.net domain, that was what I originally bought and worked on and I bought the .com domain about a month ago - I opened a thread on GPWA and got strong recommendations to buy the .com if it was available.

Hi Barclay! Given my thoughts on your questions below, hopefully they help you out.

Originally Posted by Barclay

1) The page is not indexed by Google - using site:happy.com I can see that isn't yet indexed by Google - is there any reason not to change the address?

You can change the address and the likelyhood is that it would have no negative impact if it has yet to be indexed by major search engines. You have to account for the unpredictable however, anyone could have bookmarked the URL, Google could have even crawled it but you are viewing an old datacenter which is not displaying the URL even though it has been crawled.

Best practice denotes that you should implement a 301 redirect, given it takes about 30 seconds to do this then it is probably worthwhile just in case!

Originally Posted by Barclay

2) The page is indexed by Google, but I really want to change the address - what should I do? I feel that if I just make the change google will still go looking for the original link instead of the new one... do I make a brand new page and 301 redirect the old page? This way it will still exist technically. Or can I change it without a problem?

Get the new page ready and complete with content and then 301 redirect the old URL to this. Once you have implemented the 301 redirect then make sure you update all of your internal links to reflect this change and not filter down credibility. Nothing else really needs to be done.

Originally Posted by Barclay

3) Not related to the above, but when I use google's site: tool for my website I can get a lot of "search pages" show up, which is bizarre. They seem to be for really weird search strings and I'm not sure why they are showing up, and even more why they are indexed since the pages never existed.. Can anyone shed some light on this? You can see for yourself by checking site: on the site in my sig.

This is quite wierd, just did a robot crawl of your site and the pages that are showing up are not linked to from anywhere. There is a chance that they are old pages that were indexed when you were developing the site due to a CMS function out of your control (if you run on one). As they are not linked to any more Google is taking a long time to re-index them and then remove them from the results.

Luckily these all seem to be segregated into the /search/ subfolder so if you add this to your robots.txt disallow line then they should be flushed out when Google tries to recrawl, this will certainly prevent any further search URL's being indexed at least.